Special for the 94th National Council of Social Studies Conference Registrants

If you're registering for the 94th National Council for the Social Studies Conference in Boston, be sure to join the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Semitic Museum for an evening of discovery on Saturday, November 22. Special evening hours will be brightened with snacks and beverages. Take in an illustrated curator lecture, explore on your own, or drop-in for gallery tours. The Harvard Semitic Museum will offer short tours of the collections from the Ancient Near East, including life-sized casts of famous Mesopotamian monuments, authentic mummy sarcophagi, and other artifacts illustrating the research of Harvard archaeologists. The Peabody Museum is one of the oldest anthropology museums in the world and is renowned for its collections and research on North American and Central American societies. Precious artifacts of the Maya, Moche, and New World societies fill the Latin America galleries, while Northwest totem poles and 19th-century Lakota warrior art among many other artifacts are in the Native America galleries.

Curator Castle McLaughlin will share her latest work related to the exhibition Wiyohpiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West. The exhibition and her book (available at the event for 20% off) are inspired by a unique document found in 1876 in a funerary tipi on the Little Bighorn battlefield after Custer’s defeat. The ledger book that came to be called the Autobiography of Half Moon contains vivid first-person depictions that make up a rare Native American history of events that likely occurred between 1866 and 1868 during Red Cloud’s War along the Bozeman Trail. The presentation is an innovative cultural analysis based upon historical detective work probing meaning of this rare document of cross cultural encounter at a transformative point in history.

Castle McLaughlin is Curator of North American Ethnography at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University and the author of Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clark’s Indian Collection (University of Washington Press) and A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic "Autobiography of Half Moon" (Houghton Library Publications/Peabody Museum Press).